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Reconstructing the Dream:

Martin Luther King Jr., Black Radicalism, and
African-American Political Thought.
by Peniel E . Joseph
The study of, and historical memory regarding, modern black
liberadon struggles remains stuck in a paralyzing dichotomy that
valorizes this movement's heroic period (1954-1965) while demonizing
and giving short-shrift to its later, more explicit, polidcal radicalism
(1965-1976). The former period has been the subject of an impressive
number of biographies, memoirs, case studies, and other historical
scholarship examining both the local and national impact of black
polidcal resistance during the age of Jim Crow^ In contrast, the Black
Power Movements attempt to radically reconstruct democratic
insdtudons in American and global civil society has been relegated to
the dustbin of history. Both popular and historical narratives have
conceptualized this era literally and figuratively as the "King years."
Martin Luther King Jr. remains the single individual most identified
with the modern Civil Rights Movement. The enduring image of the
movement has been encapsulated by King's " I Have a Dream" speech
during 1963's March on Washington. In contemporary dmes a nadonal
holiday has served as both a racial symbol of black progress and a
morbid example of the shattering of outsized polidcal dreams. Yet this
image of the Civil Rights Movement obscures as much as it reveals.
Indeed, America's contemporary embrace of King reveals the limited
legacy of racial symbolism by ignoring King's increasingly leftward
polidcal stance that had its roots in the hotbed of black radicalism that
existed during the civil rights era.
' The scholarship on the Civil Rights Movement is voluminous. Some
representative example include William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1980; Clayboume Carson, In Strggle:
SNCC and the Blacck Awakening of the 1960,s Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1981; Aldon Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights
Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Chang,e New York: The Free
Press, 1984; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years,
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988; Charles Payne, I've Got the Light of
Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Belinda Robnett, How Long?
How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights,
New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

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At the height of Cold War political repression, black

Americans forged a radical political philosophy from the ashes of an
almost eviscerated black left. The burning embers of revolution fueled
radical domestic notions that the Third World would provide AfricanAmericans with their only hope for liberation. Both national and
international events that took place within the context of 1954's Brown
vs the Board of Education Supreme Court decision highlighted the
global dimensions of civil rights struggles. While this era witnessed
many political transformations, some were of crucial significance,
including 1955's Bandung Conference, 1957's formal declaration of the
Independent Republic of Ghana, 1959's Cuban Revolution, and the
Congo crisis in 1960-61^ Taken together these events provided black
American radicals living in the shadows of southern civil rights
struggles with proof of the power of the oppressed all over the world.
Domestically, black radicals including William Worthy, Vicki Garvin,
Robert Williams, Harold Cruse, and Malcolm X formed the vanguard
of a radical black public sphere that would directly shape the trajectory
of Black Power politics. Mobilizing political dissent through speeches,
study groups, and political organizations, black radicals re-shaped
black politics during the heyday of civil rights by challenging Americas
monopoly on "legitimate" power and aligning themselves with nations
of color.
This short synopsis provides a context for understanding the
movements, and King's, evolution during the Black Power Movement.
More often than not King's political radicalism has been excluded from
popular celebrations regarding his political legacy. Similarly, the Black
Power Movements powerful articulation of radical humanism has been
exorcized from both historical record and public memory. Recent
scholarship has attempted to combat this historical erasure by
substantively exploring Black Power politics. Charting the depths of
unexplored oceans within black history, studies by Komozi Woodard,
Charles Jones, and Timothy Tyson have expanded depictions of postwar black liberation struggles. Similarly, Rod Bush and Joy James have
written important political analyses that complicate one-dimensional
and cliched notions of black radicalism: "integration versus
^ For a discussion of the relationship between black radicals and Cuban

revolutionaries see Ruth Reitean, The Rise and Decline of an Alliance:

Cuba and Afncan American Leaders in the 1960s, East Lansing: Michigan
State University Press, 1999.

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separation," "violence versus non-violence," and "Martin versus

Malcolm." This final cliche is especially important since its enduring
message still reverberates throughout the study of black political
thought today. It's surprising resilience is personified in the ail-too
casual juxtaposition of Malcolm as "black rebel" and Martin as
Americas "house Negro."
Michael Eric Dyson's / May Not Get There With You: The
True Martin Luther King, Jr'. attempts to provide a corrective to the
mythology that surrounds contemporary portraits of King. Specifically,
Dyson examines King's political evolution after 1965, the price he paid
for it, and what this says about American democracy, the Civil Rights
Movement, and the current state of black politics. This is an ambitious
book that, although at times stumbling, taken as a whole succeeds more
then it fails. Asserting that American society has "been long on King's
optimism while shortchanging his outrage," (p. 15) Dyson argues that
a critical examination of King requires rescuing this crucial historical
figure from a foreshortened time-frame that begins with the
Montgomery Bus Boycott and ends with the March on Washington.
For Dyson, examining King's iconography contributes to contemporary
black politics in at least three ways. First, it forces American society to
examine the radical underpinnings of King's political thought that is
too often silenced in the public arena. Second, a critical look at King's
political radicalism opens up a Pandora's Box that precipitates a reassessment of the hopes, dreams, and activism of the 1960s; especially
when measured against the jaundiced cynicism of the present. Finally,
Dyson argues that by humanizing King through an examination of his
personal flaws (for example King's alleged plagiarism and sexual
misconduct) black youth can relate to a man whose profound ideas and
activism have been large reduced to racial symbolism. This is an
ambitious study that, while providing little in the way of new archival
evidence, attempts to reconceptualize perceptions of King through a
focus on his strident anti-racism, dissent against Vietnam, and growing
pessimism regarding the depth of white supremacy in American
society.
The book's first section examines King's ideological
transformation in the aftermath of 1963's March on Washington. In a
perceptive chapter titled "Beyond Liberalism," Dyson explores how
^ Michael Eric Dyson, / May Not Get There With You: The True Martin
Luther King, Jr., New York: The Free Press, 2000), p. 15

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King's increasing frustration during the last three years of his life were
reminiscent of Malcolm X's critique of western democradc traditions:
For the most part, King had been broadly trusting of
whites. He believed that even the most vicious bigots
would be won over by black suffering. But during the last
three years of his life. King quesdoned his understanding
of whites. Although he still believed in the possibility of
transforming white society, his tacdcs shifted as his
beliefs about white racism changed . . . . Kings mature
thinking depended on the skepticism that Malcolm
engendered: blacks could not get very far, or at least not
as far as the needed to get, by playing to white morality.
King not only conceded the point, but went a step further:
Most whites, he sadly concluded, were racists, (p. 31)
King's somewhat belated recognidon of the invidious nature
of white supremacy distanced him from the white liberal support that
he had almost universally enjoyed during the first half of the 1960s.
Amid increasing racial conflict that took place in the form of urban
rebellions, increased poverty, unemployment, and squalid living
condidons. King attempted to cast a strobe-light on black poverty and
segregation through his infamous Chicago campaign in 1966.
Astonished by the depth of white racism and black co-optation in
Chicago, King retreated without a clear-cut political victory. Dyson
contrasts King's increasing disillusionment with American society's
capacity for social change with contemporary liberal and left
commentators such as Michael Tomasky, Todd Gidin and Jim Sleeper,
who criticize and-racist acdvists as pracdtioners of "identity politics."
According to Dyson, in the
. . . polidcs of racial evasion, racial history is somedmes
richly explored, but its effects are harshly minimized;
responsibility for what is wrong is shifted from whites to
blacks, or i f white responsibility is acknowledged, it is in
equal proportion to black culpability; and the punishing
group identity imposed on blacks to limit their
opportunities is neglected even as demands are made for
blacks to claim a radical individualism they had been kept
from enjoying by every resource of law and custom, (p.
43)

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This is a crucial point that underscores a key problem within

contemporary left discourses regarding race. Too often historic and
contemporary manifestations of racism and white supremacy are
dismissed (allegedly for being to "totalizing") even as their harmful
effects continue to ravage black populations in American society and
around the world.
King's push to expand his political thinking and vision beyond
the narrow confines of Cold War liberalism led to his increasingly
vocal opposition against the war in Vietnam as well as a newfound
focus on American political economy. More revealingly, King's shift
to radical internationalism and corresponding and-capitalism exacted
on him a political and spiritual plight that is scarcely even mendoned
today. King's first stance against the war in 1965 led to swift and
severe denouncements against the civil rights leader by no less then the
liberal New York Times which declared his cridcism as being the
product of a "drawling bumpkin, so ignorant that he had not read a
newspaper in years, who had wandered out of his native haunts away
from his natural calling." (p. 57) King, as Dyson points out, was not
immune to such chilling and racist cridcism. In fact, he was quite
shaken by the thunderbolts of displeasure that greeted his anti-war
posture. While this may seem to be an inconsequendal matter it makes
King's later, more forceful criticism, even more courageous since he
was painfully aware that his principled stance would have potentially
dire consequences. These consequences included King's methodical
and quite public humiliations at the hands of the white and black
liberal establishment. While black and white liberals publicly scorned
King, Black Power radicals either ignored King's radicalism or viewed
it suspiciously. However, Dyson argues that although often portrayed
as being out of step with varieties of black nationalism popularized
during this era, Martin Luther King Jr. advocated aspects of black
nadonalism including calls for community control and an aesthedc reevaluadon of beauty, history, and culture. By the last year of his life
King affirmed notions of "black manhood" that veered close to the
articulations of Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, (p. 113-116)
/ May Not Get There With You is an important and
provocadvely argued book that provides a "fresh" look at material that,
while not new to historians, will surprise and enlighten more general
readers. While Dyson skillfully crafts a King that is compelling for
present and future generations, some of the analogies that he uses are

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curious. For example, he cites Jesse Jackson's pro-corporate reform

packages (such as Jackson's "Wall Street Project") as a "brilliant
repackaging" of King's ideas. This is a dubious suggestion at best and
serves to undercut the argument that his book lays out. For if, as such a
declaration suggests, Jesse Jackson is in some way the "heir" to Martin
Luther King Jr's vision of radical democracy, then King's legacy
suffers continual expropriation and distortion. Dyson is on safer
ground, while being no less provocadve, when he compares King with
members of the "Hip-Hop" generation. For Dyson contemporary black
youths exploradons of violence, pain, and pleasure are less an example
of Cornel West's vision of "nihilism," than an existendal and cultural
wresding with the ail-too real issues of violence, racism, and poverty in
American society:
Although it may seem blasphemous to say so, there is a
great deal of similarity between Mardn Luther King, Jr.,
and a figure like Tupac Shakur. They both smoked and
drank, worked hard, and with their insomnia waged a
"war on sleep." King and Shakur cursed, told lewd jokes,
affecdonately referred to at least some of their friends as
"nigger," had fierce rivals, grew up in public at the height
of their fame, shared women with their friends, were
sexually reckless, wanted to be number one in their fields,
occasionally hung out with women of ill repute, as youth
liked nice clothes and cars, obsessed with their own
deaths, made a living with words, lived under intense
scrutiny, allegedly got physical with at least one woman,
had their last work published posthumously, and died
before reaching their potendal. (p. 177)
While the analogy between King and Shakur may seem, at least on its
surface, to be a bit of a stretch, it is potentially useful to note King's
flaws for the purpose of not writing off a generadon of black youth.
Too often, black youth are demonized by conservatives as being
inherently criminal and by the civil rights generadon as being
ungrateful beneficiaries of the "movement." Contrasdng rap music's
presumed deviance with the sancdmonious characterizadon of civil
rights heroes such as King sets up a dichotomous reladonship between
two generations often at odds with one another. However, while
humanizing King may have its benefits, it is equally important to
remember that despite similarities King was a leader of an anti-racist

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political movement. While aspects of rap music and Hip-Hop culture

may attempt to politicize issues of police brutality, incarceration, and
racism it would be a disservice to define this as a political movement
analogous with historic black liberation movements.
If Dyson is on shaky ground in his attempts to lionize Jesse
Jackson and make King relevant to the "hip-hop" generation, he is
quite impressive in challenging the historical amnesia that grips the
nation with respect to King's political radicalism. In the book's final
chapter, "The Burden of Representation," Dyson teases out the at times
paralyzing effects of King's racial symbolism. King's icon status has
obliterated the principled radicalism that he espoused during the last
frenetic years of his life. Moreover, this political radicalism was
embedded in a critically expansive humanism that, insomuch as it was
anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and caustically critical of white
supremacy, dovetailed with, rather than against, much of Black Power
radicalism. Arguing that American society had to be fundamentally
transformed in order to achieve a truly democratic nation-state. King
risked what little political capital he had left on fighting against
seemingly insurmountable odds. Sadly, it is not this Martin Luther
King, Jr. that is celebrated by politicians and commemorated with a
national holiday. In his place stands the cliched "dreamer" who wanted
blacks and whites to get along. According to Dyson blacks are not
immune to the amnesia that disallows for a critical portrait of King.
Black memory repression, or "Aframnesia," (p.292) consdtutes the flipside of revisionist history due to its inability to confront the horrors of
the past and the present.
/ May Not Get There With You is an important contribution to
recent works that reassess 1960s based black radicalism. Revealingly,
Dyson examines King's growing realization of the strength, resiliency,
and intransigent nature of white supremacist ideology. This growing
awareness that conceptions of American democracy rested on the
bedrock of black subordination, both surprised King and led him to
public pronouncements that were similar to those made by his radical
contemporaries. This is an important and understudied point. In fact in
many ways King's radicalism can be seen as part and parcel of a radical
black public sphere that had, ironically, existed on the fringes in no
small part due to King. Although marginalized by Cold War liberalism
black radicals pushed the boundaries of American political discourse by
focusing on class, colonialism and and-black racism.

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Recent scholarship has begun to examine the critical role of

black radicals during the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements'*.
For example, Timothy Tyson's thoughtful case study of Robert
Williams. Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black
Power,
has contributed to the recovery of an important and
understudied radical civil rights leader. Examining the very real threat
that Williams's radical internationalism posed against the Cold War
bound southern movement, Tyson illustrates the immediate historical
context for Black Power radicalism that would flourish during the
second half of the 1960s and early 1970s. More than just a political
maverick, Williams's advocacy of anti-colonialism, self-defense, and
critiques against white supremacy thrust him into the national and
international spotlight and would lead to his temporary exile in Cuba,
China, and Tanzania. However, Williams was not alone in his efforts
to defeat the politics and practices of American racial domination. In
fact Williams was simply the most notorious associate of a group of
radicals that included Old Leftists (Harold Cruse, Grace Lee and James
Boggs, Vicki Garvin) and a younger generation of black student
radicals (Max Stanford, Ernie Allen, Donald Freeman). The synergy
between these generations would lead to radical organizations (such as
the Revolutionary Action Movement) that both directly and indirectly
contributed to the political thought and activism of Black Power groups
including the Black Panthers.
More expansively, Komozi Woodard has written a case study
of Black Power polidcs in Newark, New Jersey that stands out as one
^ Recent works have attempted to deal with aspects of Black Power
radicalism. Ranging from historical case studies to political biographies
to studies of political thought, what unites this stream of scholarship is its
unapoiogetic attempt to take black radical discourses and activists senously,
while critically exploring the successes, shortcomings, and lessons that can
be learned through such examination. Some representatives examples include
Reitan, The Rise and Decline of an Alliance', Komozi Woodard, A Nation
Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Timothy Tyson,
Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power, Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999; Rod Bush, We Are Not What
We Seem: Black Nationalism and Class Struggle in the American Century,
New York: New York University Press, 1999; Charles Jones, ed., The Black
Panther Party Reconsidered, Baltimore: Black Classic press, 1998; Mike
Marquesee, Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties,
London: Verso, 1990; Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of Black
Feminist Politics, New York: St. Martins Press, 1999.

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of the most important works written to date on the subject. Woodard's

A Nation with a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power
Politics illuminates the local, national, and international dimensions of
1960s based black radicalism. Moreover, Woodard documents the
practical accomplishments of black radicalism in a major northeastern
city. Sentenced to the mean streets of the emerging post-industrial
order, black radicals threatened to transform boundaries of exclusion
into markers of independence. Organizing a series of local community
organizations Amiri Baraka and the Congress of Afrikan People (CAP)
marshaled their political muscle to decisively redefine black politics in
Newark and nationally. Finally, Mike Marqusee's impressively written
Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the 1960s
eloquently illustrates Muhammad Ali's heroic advocacy for peace and
social and political justice during the Vietnam War. Marqusee's
majestic narrative underscores the influence of Malcolm X in shaping
Ali's politics and places the "champ" squarely in the middle of global
upheavals that characterized the era. The importance of these studies is
that they provide context for King's, as well as the black liberation
movement's, increasingly public displays of radicalism during the era
of Black Power.
While Martin Luther King Jr., provided perhaps the most
visible face of radical humanism during the late 1960s he was by no
means alone. King's forerunners provided the critical and experiential
context for his repudiation against militarism, racism, and economic
inequality. While King remained a prisoner of the American Dream
until the final years of his life, rank-and-file black radicals bypassed
such fantasy and engaged in a protracted, often isolated, struggle for
recognition, citizenship, and equality. In short, Michael Eric Dyson's
powerful "biohistory" of King contributes, at times indirectly, to the
ongoing reassessment of black radicalism in the post-war era. Often
misunderstood, and inevitably distorted, black radicalism's piercing
cridcism of state-sanctioned violence set the stage for insurgent and
world-historic social and political transformadons. Committed to a
perilous journey on a road less traveled, black radicals transformed
American polidcs by dreaming fantasdc dreams of liberadon and
freedom; remaining unbowed and unbroken in the face of local,
nadonal, and international threats, terror, and violence. As / May Not
Get There With You rightfully underscores, Martin Luther King Jr. had
the polidcal, intellectual, and moral courage to follow.